A walk in Gettysburg's battlefield will drive home a terrifying point -- how close we came to having the Civil War go the other way.

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Follow the stones, the grave-market monuments that indicate where the various units fought here over three days in July 1863. It is a place gravid with sacrifice, bristling with turning points, each of which, had it gone the other way, might have had us requiring passports to go to spring training every year. There's the 20th Maine on Little Round Top, sanctified forever with banjo music by Ken Burns. A soldier-historian friend of mine takes people on a tour to the spot along the federal lines where Jeb Stuart's cavalry got thrashed on the third day of the battle by a series of reckless Union charges led by young George Armonstrong Custer, just one of several moments over those bloody days that probably saved the country. But almost everyone ends up at the stone wall along Cemetery Ridge, looking over the near mile and a half of completely open ground over which Robert E. Lee sent the best part of his army in a futile act of hubristic butchery that has been misinterpreted as having been noble for almost a century and a half. The wind blows through the tops of the trees, and the long grasses of the fields, and between the granite markets. No, it does more than that. It whispers among them.